Electricity has been moving us along for a good century now and we still haven't worked all the bugs out of using it yet. On friday an MIT professor made an announcement that he could create electrical power from spinach. The amount of power created by the spinach was miniscule but it could be advanced and scaled up to a meaningful supply with more research. He said it was like making a penny. Millions of them are useful, but alone they just fill small jars in your house.

This gives me some hope that I won't be feeling powerless so often in the future. As a hopeless gadget freak I have found that gadgets all run out of power at inconvenient times. Furthermore some gadgets are more graceful when they run out of power than others. For example, my hp5540 pda runs out of power and then refuses to turn on. Somehow it can be revived through a poorly understood process where I plug it in for a week. It then forgets important things like the fact that I spent an hour loading gps software on it a week before and requires a complete new set-up. This would be worth it if I actually used the gps all the time.

Last week when Robert and I went out to edit our movie in his new apple G4 laptop at the bar he had forgotten the cable and the power was insufficient to work. I am lucky that I have drowned two cannon powershot cameras. Despite a great size weight and picture quality they run out of batteries after you take the crummy pictures when your evening really gets hopping. With all the extra batteries I usually am powered-up now by swapping them as I come and go. I also think they improved the power consumption between the s100 and the s400.

I must congratulate the research in motion RIM people. My blackberry telephone is the only phone that seems to hold a charge between the times that I feel like charging it and it gives a fair warning of at least a half a day to get back to a charger.

But I want the future and I want it now when it comes to power. Whether it is Mr. Fusion from back to the future or feeding my laptop spinach at dinner I hope to avoid any further gaps in service from my wonderful fleet of electronic friends. I promise to feed them regularly. Maybe a little better solution to power management would be our solution to the middle east. I doubt it.